NYTimes: Libya Attack Discussion is the Republican’s Fault?

Surprising to no one, The New York Times agrees with the absurd spin from team Obama that the only reason anyone is talking about the Obama administration’s week worth of lies about the attacks on our embassy in Libya — attacks that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, one of them our own ambassador — is because the Republicans keep bringing it all up in the national discussion.

The Times has decided to ignore the recent hearings about what the Obama administration knew and when it knew it. There’s just no “news” to it, the paper’s editors say. “It’s three weeks before the election and it’s a politicized thing, but if they had made significant news, we would have put it on the front [page],” said Times managing editor, Dean Baquet.

So, it isn’t because the entirety of the administration claimed that the attacks in Libya grew spontaneously out of existing protests over some unseen anti-Islam Youtube video when the truth is that it was a planned attack. It isn’t because the administration repeatedly claimed that the attacks were not terror attacks, even though they were. It isn’t that now, all of a sudden, that same administration has done a 180 on all those false claims. No, it’s a story now only because the Republicans won’t let it just fade away like Obama wants it to. It’s just politics.

Baquet, Politico notes, has said that he doesn’t see “anything significantly new” in the ongoing congressional hearings on the situation in Libya. Times Executive Editor, Jill Abramson, agrees saying that the proceedings are just ‘politicized” and not worthy of notice from the “paper of record.”

Not everyone at the Times is giving the Obama administration cover on his complete collapse of foreign policy, though. Times Public Editor Margaret Sullivan recently wrote that the Times was making a mistake to refuse to cover the hearings.

I believe that the Libya hearing story belonged on The Times’s front page. It had significant news value, regardless of the political maneuvering that is inevitable with less than four weeks to go until the election. And more broadly, there is a great deal of substance on this subject that warrants further scrutiny.

This blame-the-Republicans meme is the weak way that team Obama is trying to paper over the slew of lies unleashed by the Dept. of State and Hillary Clinton, the whole milieu of the administration, and even the President himself in his visit to the UN, no less.

We’ve seen Obama spokesperson Stephanie Cutter unleash this nonsense, Robert Gibbs has disgorged it, so has Ben LaBolt, along with Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney.

But despite the spin, CNN has a devastating timeline of what the Obama administration said about the attacks on our Libyan embassy and it clearly shows that multiple sources in the Obama administration falsely blamed this Youtube video for the attacks.

If the fact that the administration lied bald faced to the American people for days before finally admitting the truth isn’t news, what exactly is news to The New York Times?

Warner Todd Huston

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago-based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment.com, BigJournalsim.com and all Breitbart News' other sites, RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, and many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs across the country to discuss his opinion editorials and current events as well as appearing on TV networks such as CNN, Fox News, Fox Business Network, and various Chicago-based news programs.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book "Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture" which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com.
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